Donald Trump won the swing state of Nevada last year, and he’s rewarding voters by crushing the heavily unionized Las Vegas tourism industry. The union-buster in chief’s policies are depressing visits to the gambling and entertainment mecca just as every major casino on the Strip is now unionized, a historic first that followed years of struggle. Trump’s punishments put a major strain on the entire state.
Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and its surrounding metropolitan area, is home to 73 percent of the Nevada population and produces 75 percent of the state budget, thanks primarily to tourism and hospitality. Vegas’s tourism industry generated nearly $88 billion last year, a 3 percent increase that beat the previous record in 2023. The state’s budget for fiscal year 2025 is $46.9 billion.
Trump’s mass deportation campaign and other anti-immigrant policies are eroding the good news, as multiple news outlets have reported this month. Vegas visitors dropped 11.3 percent in June compared to the year before; international visitors dropped 13 percent in June and hotel occupancy is down 15 percent, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
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Trump’s spending law is another cudgel, set to punish the gamblers who do show up. Starting next year, they’ll be unable to deduct all of their losses, an obscure change that could make it impossible to make a living as a professional gambler, further depressing a core customer in Sin City. Promises to help workers, like the No Tax on Tips legislation, help practically no one, as the Prospect reported this spring.
Multiple indicators show that these economic hits have already filtered down to a population heavily dependent on tourist dollars. More people in southern Nevada are missing mortgage payments, with almost 1,290 default filings in Clark County for the first half of the year. That’s up almost a third from the same period last year. Evictions are up, too, according to Princeton University’s Evictions Lab, climbing from 3,911 in January to 4,244 last month. Homelessness has been on the rise since 2023.
Local business leaders predict more unhappiness ahead, they told University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Center for Business and Economic Research economists for their quarterly report on business confidence in southern Nevada. Overall confidence is at a 16-year low, the researchers found, with drastically lower expectations for hiring and home prices, a sense of economic uncertainty, and an overall “decidedly pessimistic sentiment on local business conditions, U.S. economic conditions, and the local economy.”
Thousands of workers who run the Strip’s hospitality and tourism sector are familiar with the boom-and-bust nature of the state, said Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 60,000 workers in Las Vegas and Reno. After all, the Silver State has had severe swings since even before it was rushed to statehood in 1864 to deliver Abraham Lincoln three new electoral votes, drawing a wave of new people years before with the discovery of silver at the Comstock Lode.
But this cycle is different, because it’s driven entirely by presidential policy choices. “We were on track to have a banner year,” Pappageorge said. “That has now been completely turned around.” He called on the Trump administration for a “course correction,” and to “make sure you’re welcoming the travel and tourism customer.”
REPUBLICAN GOV. JOE LOMBARDO envisions a different future for the state, dominated not by tourism but by tech companies and factories. Two years ago, he listed advanced manufacturing, logistics, and technology as priorities before Nevada’s traditional focus on hospitality, tourism, and sports, telling a reporter at the time that “the major economic development story in Nevada over the past decade has transpired at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center where Tesla, Panasonic, Redwood Materials, Google, and Switch, to mention a few, have invested billions of dollars and created tens of thousands of jobs.”
Earlier this year, Lombardo introduced SB461 to give those businesses a boost. Among other things, the proposed law offers tax abatements to aerospace and defense, battery and robotics factories, clean energy, and other high-tech companies. Nevada’s tax abatements have previously drawn heat, such as the more than $330 million deal in 2023 for Tesla to expand its Nevada Gigafactory in Sparks. Lawmakers subsequently tried but failed to prevent such giveaways in the future.
More recently, Lombardo issued a $4.7 million abatement earlier this month to Crocs to build an e-commerce order fulfillment center in North Las Vegas, “which will serve as the company’s shipping hub for all Crocs products across the U.S.” The deal is expected to create 70 jobs with hourly pay of $34.03 within the next five years, and $20,026,480 in taxes over ten years.
“The seven companies that have been approved today for abatements will generate hundreds of high-paying jobs and millions in investment into Nevada,” Lombardo said in a statement. “These investments reflect our ongoing commitment to creating good-paying jobs for Nevadans and building a strong, diverse economy in our state.”
One hitch: Nevadans don’t want those jobs. A study published this month analyzing data from a job seekers’ survey found that the jobs that are available aren’t the ones people want. Those are positions in transportation and warehousing, accommodation and food services, and administration. But health care is the state’s fastest-growing sector. And while tech and manufacturing companies in Reno are creating more “higher skills job opportunities,” that requires advanced credentials or special training, which the current Nevada workforce doesn’t necessarily have.
And even if they did, Trump’s policies are putting the hurt on those industries, too. For example, a 2024 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification shows that Tesla has laid off 693 workers in five Tesla facilities in Sparks since receiving the nine-figure tax abatement deal, including 668 from a location with the same address as the Gigafactory. Elon Musk’s association with President Trump has poisoned Tesla sales with its core environmentalist audience, as sales and earnings plummeted in the most recent quarter, exacerbated by Trump’s tariffs and the end of electric-vehicle consumer rebates.
At lithium-ion battery manufacturer Lithion Battery, executives want to ship home equipment they’ve already purchased from China, the only place they can get it. But if they do it now, they’ll spend 30 percent on top of the hundreds of thousands they’ve already spent, plus, of course, the cost of shipping. And then there’s the question of getting the necessary visas for the Chinese experts whom the company needs to install the equipment. The multinational company last year opened its second Nevada factory.
It’s “a little frustrating,” the company’s senior vice president Jim Hodge told the Prospect, given “all the talk of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S.”
Nevada’s gross domestic product was down overall for the first quarter of the year, Bureau of Economic Analysis data shows, as it was in 38 other states.
Lombardo did not respond to a request for comment.
Economists caution that summer is always a down time for Las Vegas, and that the fall may yet see another wave of tourist cash. They listed upcoming conferences and events as major attractions, including the Las Vegas Grand Prix in November, the National Finals Rodeo in December, and the Enhanced Games next May, at which athletes are allowed to juice their performance with banned substances.
But why risk an international visit when you’re liable to end up in an ICE gulag, like the woman from New Zealand, who works at a maximum security juvenile detention center in the U.S., or the Welsh artist who came for a vacation, or the Canadian actress whom federal agents threw in a freezing cell for two weeks even though her visa had been approved? Even if you don’t endure such an ordeal, you might spend your money on a flight to America only to be turned away at the border because JD Vance is too emotionally fragile to handle memes.
It’s too soon to tell what the recent gloomy numbers mean for Las Vegas or the state, said Andrew Wood, director of the University of Nevada’s Center for Business and Economics Research. Still, he said, there are worrying signs.
“I’m not ready to say where we’re headed,” Wood said. “It feels like we’re on a knife’s edge.”